Team Player

Yesterday, Pajamas Media featured a story on Leon Panetta's brief but eventful tenure as director of the Central Intelligence Agency.  The story's author, Nate Hale, is unimpressed.

When Leon Panetta took over the CIA earlier this year, he was described (in some circles) as the wrong man for the wrong job at the wrong time.

Seven months later, that assessment is proving eerily prescient. As the agency prepares for a politically-charged investigation of its interrogation practices, Mr. Panetta’s leadership is noticeably lacking.

Panetta held the position of White House Chief of Staff in the Clinton administration.  Folks may recall that if there's one thing about the Clintonistas, they are a loyal bunch, willing to take one for the team.  When the 9/11 commission conducted its inquiry into how our government failed to prevent the attack on the World Trade Center in New York, former National Security Adviser and devoted Clintonista Sandy Berger, cleansed the National Archives of any hint that the Clinton administration may have ignored credible warnings of impending attack. 

Berger's theft and destruction of secret documents was a purely political act, designed to protect the Clinton legacy, thus preserving Hillary's viability as a presidential contender in the 2008 election.  Though Berger was convicted his plea bargaining got him a sweet deal.  He was convicted of illegally removing highly classified documents from the National Archives and intentionally destroying some of them, but he got off with a fine, community service, and since he's such a trustworthy guy, he'll even get his top secret security clearance back.  In the end protecting the Clintons didn't cost him that much.

But the Clintons are out, the Obama's are in, and Panetta has joined that team.  It may be the one in the same team, the Democrats.  Panetta's first notable action was to throw his agency under the bus in order to cover for the Democrat from San Francisco, Nancy Pelosi.  Pelosi had put herself in awkward position.  After demanding investigations into the CIA's alleged torture of al Qaeda detainees, it came out she already knew and approved what the CIA was doing, having been briefed on exactly what interrogation techniques the CIA employed. 

How embarrassing.  So she accused the CIA of lying to her, but the CIA stood by their story.  Pelosi had been briefed, they said.  But then along comes Panetta to say, hold the phone!  The CIA withheld information from congress, after all.  Pelosi got her credibility back.  And what exactly was it that the CIA withhold?

We refer to the manufactured “scandal” surrounding the agency’s plans to enlist contractors in the hunt for high-value terror targets. That proposal — which involved the controversial security firm Blackwater — was discussed on several occasions, but never reached the operational stage. Three previous CIA directors declined to brief the proposal to Congress, largely because there was nothing to it.

But that didn’t stop Mr. Panetta from rushing to Capitol Hill when he learned of the project, offering an emergency briefing to members of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees. Congressional Democrats immediately pounced on Panetta’s admission, saying it supported claims (by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi) that the spy agency had repeatedly lied to lawmakers.

Sources now suggest that Mr. Panetta regrets his actions.  Columnist Joseph Finder, who writes for the Daily Beast, reported last week that the CIA director spoke with his predecessors after he reported the program’s existence to members of Congress.  George Tenet, Porter Goss, and Michael Hayden were all aware of the program, but they elected not to inform Congress because it never evolved past the “PowerPoint” stage.

The Clinton team was certainly political, but compared to the Obama crowd, they were slackers.  Obama's poll numbers continue to sink as his stimulus has so far stimulated nothing but government, his cap and trade legislation has been put on hold, and his version of health care reform has become so unpopular that people are screaming at their congressmen for supporting it.  What to do?  Attorney General Holder has the answer.

According to the Washington Post, Attorney General Eric Holder will appoint a special prosecutor to examine allegations that CIA officers and contractors violated anti-torture laws during interrogations of terror suspects.

Mr. Holder’s reported decision is anything but a surprise. Literally from the day they took office, members of the Obama administration have been weighing a probe into CIA practices under President George W. Bush. The recent leaks about the agency’s potential partnership with Blackwater — and claims of interrogation abuse — were little more than groundwork for Eric Holder’s pending announcement.

When all else fails, bash Bush.  An investigation in the CIA interrogation methods is red meat for the fever swamps of the left -- a slender hope that a trail will lead all the way back to George Bush or Dick Cheney.  For Obama it's a distraction from the abysmal job he's doing.  Bush is the go-to target when things go sour and Obama doesn't know what else to do.  In this case the CIA winds up as collateral damage.  The Commander-In-Chief is so sorry, and the CIA director is sadly unable to defend his agency.

Instead, Leon Panetta became obsessed with a non-scandal, losing valuable opportunities to defend his agency and its personnel. One retired CIA official I spoke with referred to him as “another Colby,” — a reference to William Colby, the DCI who cooperated with the Church and Pike Committees that probed agency abuses in the 1970s. To this day, many CIA employees feel that Colby went too far in his cooperation, opening the door for increased congressional oversight that gutted the agency’s covert operations directorate.

The bitter “Colby” reference is a sure sign that morale at Langley is plummeting. And with good reason. The looming special counsel inquiry will make a skittish organization even more risk averse. Talented personnel will continue to leave the agency, believing (correctly) that the CIA will leave them twisting in the wind when the going gets tough.

It’s a trend that is sadly familiar. Following previous scandals in the 70s and 80s, thousands of skilled analysts and operations specialists left Langley for greener pastures, leaving behind the hacks and politicians who presided over such intelligence debacles as 9-11.

Strong leadership could go a long way in taking on the agency’s critics and preventing another mass exodus from the agency.  But sadly, Mr. Panetta is not that type of leader.

I don't know what kind of leader Panetta is, but Panetta's team, the Democratic party, is all politics all the time.  There is nothing else that matters, not national defense, nothing.  Panetta proves again, he's a team player.  To paraphrase Churchill, Mr Hale is unimpressed with Panetta.  He has much to be unimpressed about.

Comments

[CaptDMO]

So, am I right in assessing this to be-
The nice folks who desperately cling to retro-accountability in failure to prevent known "enemies" from sabotage and murder on a grand scale are continuing to demand a gut of the "assets" from CIA?

Second, I thought *ahem* "we" (Conservatives/libertarians/Independents) all agreed to let THAT
(amongst others) Pelosi-CIA thing slide as the simple buffoonery that it was,
and, like the VP, simply let her just keep talkin' to prove the point.

How about this?
I blame Ms. Pelosi for repeated failure in enabling the "gay", "feminist", and "undocumented" (as in "Show me your papers!") communities to garner more "privilege" (special laws) in public, and in public policy, than they've actually merited.

(Disingenuous, I know, THAT'S what liberal public perception is made of.)

There, THAT ought to set the political stage in Cali. for her further
"seat holding" position, and blaze the path toward more "bi-partisan" (oxymoron these days) "Can't we all just get along...?"

*sigh*
Desperate times call for desperate measures, ESPECIALLY when that "desperation" is as manufactured as a "crisis" of "The sky is falling...the sky is falling!", when in fact, "The Emperor has no clothes!"

Just Sayin'